Karn Bianco, one of the founders of the UK’s first trade union for workers in the games industry.
Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

It is known as “crunch” – long hours of unpaid overtime put in by computer games workers in the run-up to highly anticipated releases, often at the behest of managers.

But the practice could soon be a thing of the past, as games workers unionise for the first time this weekend, taking aim at overtime, racism, sexism and bullying, which some say is rife in the sector.

“For many people it’s been a badge of honour to work all night and until the early hours of the morning and there’s also a kind of culture that goes with that excessive overtime,” said Karn Bianco, one of the founders of the UK branch of Game Workers Unite (GWU UK).

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The game programmer, based in Portsmouth, spoke of his experience of working 80-hour weeks, back to back, as an intern after university. “It’s a very passion -driven industry in which many people are just happy to be making games for a living and in my own case it took a year to begin to feel tired and I began to make a conscious effort to work less,” he said.

Several studios have been involved in controversies over working conditions. Rockstar was forced to defend its working conditions after a New York magazine profile in which its British co-founder Dan Houser spoke of working 100-hour weeks before the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in October.

While companies such as Rockstar have insisted that they are working to improve welfare and conditions, a global survey last year by the International Games Developers Association (IGDA) found that “crunch” was still a problem, with 51% reporting that it still featured in their job.

The GWU UK, which is signing up members from Friday and will hold an inaugural meeting on Sunday to elect an executive, follows on from a movement that originally sprung up online and at games conventions in the US. An online community of 200 workers in Britain has already formed around the GWU UK. It decided to organise under the umbrella of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union, which has been building an increasing profile among workers in sectors that have not traditionally been unionised to a great degree.

The games sector is worth nearly £3bn to the UK economy and employs more than 47,000 people in companies that range from tiny studios to large operations employing hundreds.

Along with campaigning on pay and conditions, Bianco and his fellow union members also plan to take a stand against racism and sexism in an industry still largely dominated by white men.

“The sheer existence of women in games is enough to spur hate mobs in some cases. We’ve known of people trawling through the social media accounts of new employees and asking for them to be forced out if it was discovered, for example, that they were following feminist figures,” he said.

“If anything, things are getting worse in some ways. It’s tied into trends such as the rise of the alt-right or a general hostility towards what is seen as political correctness. Companies have not been great at speaking out about this. They don’t want to poke the bear. We want to take a stand.”

Reacting to the initiative, the chief executive of the Independent Game Developers’ Association (Tiga), Richard Wilson, said it was “completely neutral” on the issue of unionisation but said “crunch” was increasingly becoming a thing of the past. Wilson said his “overriding impression” of the industry was that it was a very welcoming one.

“I think the structure of games development is such that it is very team-orientated one as well. The bonds are likely to be much stronger than in other sectors,” he said, adding that about two-thirds of studios employed four people or fewer.

“Some studios do engage in crunch behaviour and Rockstar is the most recent example of that, but I also know that many studios do not go down that route because they would view it as a miscalculation of management.”

Jodie Azhar, a Bafta-winning former technical art director at the developer Creative Assembly, recently founded her own company, Teazelcat, aiming to build a studio culture that supported staff and promoted wellbeing. She welcomed the push to unionise the sector.

Jodie Azhar, the founder of the inclusive games company Teazelcat, welcomed the move. Photograph: Handout

“In general it’s a really good idea. Workers in our sector often don’t start from the perspective of fighting for their rights. It’s competitive and people are led to believe that they should be grateful for even having a job in it,” she said.

“Being a creative industry there is a sense of everyone being passionate about the work, but it can mask the fact that it is a business. We’re an industry that is still relatively young, so perhaps unionisation would be good in terms of helping to formulate standards.”

‘Crunch’ workers: their stories

Worker A

A tester for a video games company on a zero-hours contract, he works at a company where there is a hierarchy in terms of language testers. Those specialising in southern European and eastern European languages are on £8 an hour, German speakers are on £9, while Nordic language speakers are on £10. He does not get any sick pay so often works when he is ill. He is often stressed because he is worried about money and if work might dry up from one day to the next.

Worker B

A developer in a large studio, he says that the coding team are constantly given unrealistic targets that they cannot meet and are made to work weekends in order to hit deadlines. He complains of bullying in the company, telling of one occasion when the studio head berated an assistant for not putting staples on at a 45-degree angle.

Worker C

Now unemployed, he was a community manager for a small games studio, which he describes as a “high stress” environment. He says he was lumbered with several additional tasks because there was no one else to do them, and was not taken seriously when he complained about homophobia.